Shock study: Adult Web sites are filled with malware

Wow, who would have guessed that visiting adult Web sites would be dangerous to the health of your computer? I mean, of all of the genres of sites out there—sports, tech, politics, books, etc.—the last I would have predicted to be dangerous was adult ones. Thanks, International Secure System Lab!

The deal is that scammers and hackers and whatnot know one thing: people sure do look at a lot of adult content online. (One-third of all downloads is adult-related!) So what better way to target people to grab them when they’re the most vulnerable?

What’s going in is that a lot of these sites are desperate for traffic, so they’ll stop at nothing to keep you hanging around. Things like tricky Javascript that locks you into a site, that sort of thing.

Even worse is the so-called “free sites” that are loaded with malware: trojans, viruses, keyloggers—just garbage.

If there’s one piece of advice I can give, it’s this: use Firefox and install AdBlock Plus and No Script. You can still do whatever, but the odds of getting bitten by some piece of malware is greatly reduces.

Or use Mac/Linux. I can’t imagine too many of these pieces of malware affect Mac or Linux.